FeedCity

Traveling today, but carved out a nice morning in Dallas to fix and deploy several bugs. Loving this weather too.

Imagine the editorial the NYT runs the day after the election when Trump wins and it dawns on them that it's really over. For good. No backsies. We're going down. Sayonara. Thanks for the memories. We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when.

Will the NYT make it through the election without running an editorial that says clearly if we elect this mad king fascist and give him nukes and our military, and our industrial might, and what remains of our virtue, then we deserve the hell that will rain down on us. If this were a Hollywood movie, we'd be waiting for the climax, but I have a feeling they will exit existence with a whimper rather than a fist held high in solidarity.

Bloggers, here's an idea. When you write a piece you're proud of, end it with a sentence like this: "And that's why I have a blog." It plants a seed, which through repetition and appearing in many places, might help people appreciate the purpose of a blog. We've had a lot of mud slung at us, let's start undoing that.

There's this great story in the Fargo TV series where one of the villains says there's a point when an animal that has been captured, and relaxes when it realizes that it is no longer a being and has become food. At some level food knows it's food. Evolution has been kind to us that way. At what point in last night's game did you realize that the Mets were no longer a baseball team and had become food?

The Dodgers soiled our lovable slumping Mets last night. It was a sad sight. One to forget as soon as possible. And don't forget folks, there's always next year. If I were the Dodgers, I'd expect the Mets to win tonight, and the Dodgers will probably begrudgingly go along wi...

I was lucky enough to sit down with Mike McCue, CEO at Flipboard, and 404 Media co-founder (and former Motherboard Editor-in-Chief) Jason Koebler to talk about the future of media and its intersection with the future of the social web. Savvy journalists at forward-thi...

One of the things that makes me want to see Automattic stick around and grow is that they have a really large codebase that has been scaled, debugged and maintained for over 20 freaking years. And the most important thing -- they don't break users. The code I wrote to run ag...

I made the reallySimple package for Node.js because I wanted to make it as easy as possible to read feeds in Node apps. It should be as easy as reading a file. Give it the URL of a feed, get back a JavaScript object that's as simple as feeds are. It can read RSS, Atom and RDF feeds, but you get the same object regardless of what form the feed was in. I'm up for creating some example apps if you're interested. There is a very simple Hello World app included in the package and a set of demo apps. It's MIT-licensed, so you can do whatever you want with the code. It would lovely to see it ported. The idea is to plant some seeds in the Node.js world to make it easy for developers to try out new ideas with feeds, figuring the easier it is, the more people will do it. Be creative. Blow our minds! :-)

Reading Atalanta by Jennifer Saint.

The question has come up in various contexts, is a Substack feed a blog? Yes, I think it can be. For some reason people thought I'd say no. In 2003, I compiled a list of things that make a blog a blog, and it's not about the software you use, rather it's about who's writing it, and whether they're being edited. Now it's a different question to ask if I would use it. I would not. Because it forces you to use their editor. And that's a pernicious form of lock-in. It might sound like a small thing, but it means you can't easily try out something new. You are not available to other software developers as a possible user, so no software will be designed for you. I know how well that kind of system works. And that's probably why they lock you into using their editor. If I can't switch without breaking everything, I'm not going there.

Mathew Ingram asks if AI will save us or kill us. It could both save and kill us. That's what's so disturbing about evolving. We live such short lives, people aren't really design to evolve, but because of medicine and other tech, we are often forced to do it. Evolution can c...

I keep writing on my hybrid WordPress/Mastodon blog at my kitchen table. This morning I wrote about why I don't believe in the Ya Gotta Believe, a baseball slogan coined by a 1973 Mets pitcher Tug McGraw. It's on-topic because the Mets are in a challenging series with the Do...

⚠️ .io domain¹ likely being phased-out² — seven suggested steps Good article in The Verge summarizing recent .io related events, see that for more context if this is news to you: * https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/8/24265441/uk-treaty-end-io-domain-chagos-islands It looks likely .io (and .io domains) will go away in the next few years (as .cs and .yu did³), so here are my suggested steps to take depending on your usage of .io domains: 1. Avoid buying new .io domains (or making ...

Wednesday session

Great post from Cory Doctorow on using RSS:

Using RSS is a chance to visit a utopian future in which the platforms have no power, and all power is vested in publishers, who get to decide what to publish, and in readers, who have total control over what they read and how, without leaking any personal information through the simple act of reading.

It’s weird that we still have to tell people about RSS in 2024, but that’s just how it is.

It’s pretty easy to write bad HTML, because for most developers there are no consequences. If you write some bad Javascript, your application will probably crash and you or your users will get a horrible error message. It’s like a flashing light above your head telling the world you’ve done something bad. At the very least you’ll feel like a prize chump. HTML fails silently. Write bad HTML and maybe it means someone who doesn’t browse the web in exactly the same way as you do doesn’t get access to the information they need. But maybe you still get your pay rise and bonus.

So it’s frustrating to see the importance of learning HTML dismissed time and time again.

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I ported another Hugo theme over to Micro.blog. It’s called Soho, based on the Hyde theme. Just needed a little adapting for microblog posts. Available for previewing in the plug-in directory.